For the past year or more, some friends from Meditation New Zealand and I, have been running Meditation & Mindfulness programs in Auckland’s maximum security prison at Paremoremo.

People ask, “what’s it like working with criminals?”  I find it very disconcerting how we, as a society, tend to ‘dehumanize’ criminals. Even our justice system tends to do this. Creating an ‘Us and Them’ mentality.   Can we do better? Yes!

Crime deserves punishment but prisoners also need reforming otherwise we pay the price.  Currently, prisons serve as ‘criminal higher education’.  When people leave prisons they have often been trained in criminal behavior, feel some anger towards society for their treatment under the penal system and often are more hardened.

Is there anything that we can or should be doing to make it so that the recidivism rate for released inmates is dramatically lowered? So that we are creating a safer and more humane society?

In this series, we will be exploring this subject and looking for real ways to achieve this.